Designing Information to Evoke Empathy Madeline Coven ...€¦ · Designing Information to Evoke...
Transcript of Designing Information to Evoke Empathy Madeline Coven ...€¦ · Designing Information to Evoke...
Designing Information to Evoke Empathy
Madeline Coven
Independent Study with Brian Sturm
May 1, 2015
On my honor, I have not taken unauthorized help on this assignment.
Madeline Coven (signed)
Introduction
We do not associate information with feeling. Information is a cold, hard thing with
numbers and charts, whereas empathy is an intimate psychic bond between self and other. In
this essay, I will try to bridge objective information and subjective emotion. Empathy is a way of
thinking about information. If we empathize with the subjects, we remember their stories and
therefore the contexts in which they operate. Information analyzed in depth like this is better
remembered than information that is analyzed superficially.
In fact, we can think of empathy as a kind of Rosetta Stone (Lidwell et al. 2010), a
parallel language for understanding people and interpreting their context. As a key, or element
of common understanding, for comprehending people, empathy is a natural fit. Indeed, it is a
universal human process that is capable of understanding others outside of our in-group.
Happiness and sadness, like language, are universal concepts. Perhaps what evokes feelings
differs culture to culture, but the fact that experiences evoke feelings is a starting point for
curiosity about others: "what is it like?" for example when referring to an experience.
Empathy is the frame (Lidwell, et al. 2010) through which we see another person's
feelings accurately. "She lost a family member" rather than "the war was won" is a contrast
between two frames. The first is intimate and empathetic, while the other is impersonal and
congratulatory. These kinds of framing are often used for constructing a view of others. Frames
are usually associated with propaganda or other types of political messaging. However,
empathy is a frame as well for thinking about others.
Empathy tries to bring others of often divergent groups to our moral community, whereas
the merely sympathetic tends to divide those others from us. When we empathize, we see
ourselves as having something in common with others. When we sympathize, we merely pity
the person and in doing so, we separate their circumstances from ours. Or, in the words of the
great essayist James Baldwin in "Everybody's Protest Novel," from Notes of a Native Son:
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of
dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to
experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and
violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty (Baldwin 1998).
Indeed, the superficial notion is that empathy is a warm, cozy feeling with the other. We
"get along", we find a lot in common with each other. Before empathy can happen, however, we
have to experience a certain uneasy feeling, especially if the other suffers. That feeling is that
the other person is very like us, and yet different in condition, which makes it necessary for us to
imagine that other person's context.
We think of information design as quite different; it is an impersonal practice rooted in
numbers and not emotions. In fact, numbers and statistics can dull our sense of feeling for
others. However, things in the environment are information if they have differences from each
other; even a blank page in a book is data if the other pages are not blank. Emotions are
analogue information, meaning that they are along a continuum; that is, one does not feel hate
or love, but levels of either. Facts are either true or false, so their discreteness is analogous to
the digital.
We design with empathy, rather than for empathy. We design advertisements and other
campaigns to appeal to people's hopes. This is designing with empathy. Why not, then, design
for people's best hopes for other people? This would be designing for empathy. The website
www.humansofnewyork.com offers a case in point. The site has street portraits and anecdotes
from many different New Yorkers, and the site's visitors get a sense that they are meeting these
ordinary people, from the homeless to businesspeople. These empathetic yet unsentimental
portraits keep the subjects in control of their own stories by providing their own words rather
than the photographer playing the part of the omniscient narrator in control of how these stories
are told. Controlling another person's story turns that person into an object of his or her own
experiences rather than the subject of them. Compare:
"My parents have died and I don't know what to do."
"Her parents have died and she doesn't know where to turn and I pity her."
The first sentence invites a person's empathy and perhaps some heartfelt advice. The second,
to which the omniscient narrator could add words, could simply tell the other person how to feel.
There is a directness and effortlessness to the first that makes it poignant. The effortful quality
of the second may make people suspicious about whether the child deserves empathy, since
the omniscient narrator is self-conscious about telling us to feel something.
We must understand first that information design for empathy is information design
about people and their situations. This practice is most essential, but is certainly not limited to,
when the people we are empathizing with suffer. By identifying as a subjective source, non-
propaganda can increase credibility by author identification and ownership of the information (cf.
Edward Tufte, a statistician and information designer, in his book Beautiful Evidence) (Tufte
2006). Personal stories and stories about individuals are just such information.
A comparison between Uncle Tom's Cabin and Persepolis, with some other references,
is instructive for comparing the supposedly objective propaganda that evokes sympathy, with
the honestly subjective story that evokes empathy.
Rule #1: Make the object of empathy a subject in his
or her own story.
The first rule that Persepolis follows is to make the object of empathy a subject in his or
her own story; empty sentiment keeps the object of empathy an object. Objects of sentiment
are never agents in their own stories; they simply have things done to them. An example of
keeping an object of empathy frozen thus is in Uncle Tom's Cabin, when Eliza is portrayed after
escaping her master as
"A young and slender woman, with garments torn and frozen, with one shoe gone, and the
stocking torn away from the cut and bleeding foot, was laid back in a deadly swoon upon two
chairs (Stowe 2007)."
Whereas, the protagonist of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, in her characterization of
herself, never relies on this kind of sentimental boilerplate to describe her experiences. She
makes herself an actor in her own story. She sardonically comments about her time as a
homeless person who almost died of bronchitis: "it was a trivial love affair that almost did me in
(Satrapi & Parannoud 2007)." Because she makes mistakes and triumphs just like we do, we
are willing to put ourselves in her place for the story. Because Eliza makes no mistakes and
does not triumph in any significant way, we are not as willing to put ourselves in her place as
people who can imagine what it is like to be her. The point of empathetic identification is not to
confirm one's idea of a person, however flattering that may be. Instead, we must identify with
people as they are, even with their faults. This phenomenon is what keeps Eliza an object in
her own story.
Rule #2: Keep the story about one person if possible
Another rule Persepolis follows is to make the story about one person if possible, not an
anonymous crowd. People relate better to the former than to the latter, in keeping with the
observation that numbers can numb compassion.
A study by Small, et al. showed that people were more willing to donate money to
children in Africa if they were told one girl's story than if they were shown statistics about
starvation in Africa (2007). This study would seem to show that compassion is a limited
resource that we cannot extend to many others. However, this would be wrong. Instead of
being unfeeling towards large numbers of people, we actually feel so powerless in the face of so
much suffering that we do less than we otherwise would have done as a result of emotion
regulation (Cameron & Payne 2011).
We may feel a certain bond with others, but empathy is for perspectives, and there is
one person per perspective. Thus, we can feel empathy for one person at a time, even if that
time is in the milliseconds it takes for neurons to fire. If we imagine what life was like aboard a
slave ship, we are empathizing only with what an individual, not the whole group, would have
felt. We can, however, have compassion (different from empathy) for the group of slaves as a
whole.
Facts tend to be quantitative, which also discourages empathy, but information can also
make use of the qualitative, which tends to encourage empathy. Stories like Persepolis yield
rich qualitative information, as well as many different empathic experiences. Visual stories like
Persepolis have less obvious qualitative information than textual stories. The information
gleaned is the context of the person's situation. It is important to be specific about this situation.
Rule #3: Do not reduce people to one type of thing
When we do deal with large numbers (unavoidable when dealing with information
design), it is difficult to give each person an identity beyond being part of a group, whether that
group is Iranians or Holocaust victims. A large glass panel with first names of Holocaust victims
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. helps the museum to do
this; the names give each person an identity beyond the numbers of dead. This is a huge
stepping stone to empathy, as we relate to people we name. "Emily is hungry" is different from
"the child is hungry." The name is an individual identifier rooted in personalization, while a
number can be applied to anything. Identification cards that match people with those who lived
under the Holocaust also take from the mere abstract category of Holocaust victim.
Thus, do not reduce the essentials of people's experiences to numbers; this will numb
and overwhelm the audience. Luckily, a proposed "'large digital clock ticking [with] every
second representing a life lost' (Linenthal 1995)" was not incorporated in the design of the
Holocaust Museum. Such a quantitative method would have removed the quality of the lives
that preceded the deaths of the Holocaust.
To give visitors a sense of both quality and quantity of lives lost, the museum did
something else. Yaffa Eliach's photographs in the tower of the Holocaust museum are another
excellent way for audiences to identify with large numbers of Holocaust victims. They "'[have]
the ... task of restoring identity and individuality to the otherwise anonymous victims of the
Nazis.'(Linenthal 1995)" This collection of photographs is from a single shtetl during the time
just before the Nazis destroyed it, and the collection portrays the people "apart from Nazi
definitions--prisoner, inmate, victim (Linenthal 1995)" and thus makes them subjects in their own
story rather than simple objects, which displaying them as a category of prisoners and nothing
else would have made them.
One other attempt to evoke empathy through large numbers is in the illustrations of
slave ship layouts. The key to these diagrams' success was the individual stories of slaves that
were published at the same time. The pictures are a borderline case of empathy for large
numbers of people because they illustrate "how slavery turns individuals into anonymous
commodities (Tufte 2006)." Because of the anonymous quality of the people shown, it does not
quite evoke empathy. It evokes sympathy and compassion. Sympathy and compassion do not
take into account the whole person, but simply their suffering, but empathy is an understanding
of the whole person, whether they suffer or not. We can sympathize with a group because of
one quality, like suffering, that they have in common. Since empathy takes one perspective at a
time, which is an understanding of a whole person who is different from others, we can do it with
only one person at a time.
Rule #4: Use Visual Cues That Evoke Empathy
The large eyes of Persepolis characters with the adult features may be a result less of
cuteness, and more to do with the face-ism ratio; even unsympathetic characters, like the
bearded Revolutionary Guards, are depicted with large eyes. The face-ism ratio is a cognitive
principle whereby when we see a person whose face is particularly prominent, we see the
person as having more personality, and as less of an object than those whose bodies are
particularly prominent (Lidwell, et al. 2010). In addition, we see that person as more intelligent,
dominant, and ambitious. The characters of Persepolis often display these traits; Marjane
herself displays all three. This need not prevent empathy, as people can identify with others
who display both dominant and vulnerable traits.
Rule #5: Keep things at an appropriate level for the
viewer, physically and cognitively.
If the person we are to empathize with is a child, show things at a child’s level. If
possible, display pictures for and other information about children at child level, and adults at
adult level. Any language should be appropriate for its intended audience. In the Persepolis
movie, these elements are in place, and I will use two party scenes to compare the child and
adult perspectives, done right. When Marjane is a child, she scurries between adults' legs at a
party as children do. What we see is the way adults move over children, and the jumble of life
as it happens over the children. This jumble does not feel relevant to the child yet, but it will
someday. When we see Marjane as an adult at parties, we see her with other adults dancing
and roistering with alcohol and loud music (the enjoyment of alcohol is usually above a child's
comprehension), against the dictates of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Rule #6: Show intimate moments
Another principle is to show intimate moments where possible between one or two
people; this establishes relationships similar to those that the audience has also experienced.
Persepolis succeeds here, showing Marjane and her grandmother either conversing about little
Marjane's dreams of religious prophethood, or talking of teenage Marjane's exile to Austria. The
first situation establishes Marjane as a subject in her own story who has independent wishes
and hopes for her future. The second humanizes Marjane. Another pair of intimate characters
is Marjane and her uncle Anoosh. Anoosh is a communist, and Marjane's favorite uncle. In
each case, the two characters are close together and have an obvious bond. Indeed, Anoosh is
usually seen with Marjane, and he tells her stories of his previous life.
The photographs of the shtetl in the tower at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum record intimacy in their recording of everyday life. The future Holocaust victims
converse with each other, go on picnics, go to school, and go to the synagogue. They have
their own wishes and hopes for the future.
Rule #7: Keep it physically at eye level
In general, keep the people with whom the audience is to empathize at eye level.
Impersonal forces that threaten them, like invading armies or executioners should be above,
dark, and faceless, and therefore more threatening. This might seem to dehumanize such
people, but it simply makes it clear that the situation itself has dehumanized the perpetrators of
crimes more than the victims. In Persepolis, there is a scene at the beginning in which unarmed
protesters against the rule of Shah Reza Mohammed Pahlavi clash with the Shah's army. The
protestors, though a mass of people, are each given an individual look; some are veiled or
bearded, some are clad in the fashion of the 1970s. They are roughly at eye level, while the
soldiers, identical to each other in helmets, tanks, and gas masks, shoot the protestors above
eye level.
Rule #8: Make a story.
For all that human nature has to recommend it in terms of compassion, we still find it
somewhat difficult to empathize with people beyond the immediate in-group. Yet, the project of
convincing people to empathize with the other is a necessary one in our modern world of
extensive contact with world cultures. Fortunately, contact with people from a group labeled as
the "other" can significantly reduce prejudice, especially when the groups must work together
towards a common goal (Sherif et al. 1961).
The Holocaust museum and the movie Persepolis each convinces us to empathize with
the other in different ways. The ID cards handed to people in the Holocaust museum do not
always match visitors with those "just like them"; they might be Jews, where the visitors might
be Christian. These ID cards give people stories to follow and emotionally invest in during their
visit to the museum. Persepolis strips away all but the essentials of the other’s experience by
rendering all people in black and white rather than the familiar pink or brown of human skin, and
like the photographs of the victims of genocide in the Holocaust museum tower, give just
enough detail to distinguish as individuals, which is vital to empathy. Seeing a distinctive face
instead of a simple caricature humanizes people considerably.
Since Persepolis is a narrative, people respond to it as a fictional narrative even though
it has autobiographical elements. Fortunately for our goal of information design for empathy,
"emotional contagion comes into play in our reactions to narrative" (Keen 2010). Narratives
"manipulate our feelings and call upon our built-in capacity to feel with others" (Keen 2010), but
they can also convey novel information, even if in passing. For example, captions to a picture
or voiceover to a movie can convey such factual information with a powerful visual statement.
Narration that uses the devices of fiction, like "quoted monologue and psychonarration ...
[that] give a reader access to the inner life of characters" tends to "disarm readers of some of
the protective layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world (Keen
2010)." Indeed, the movie Persepolis is narrated by the main character as her inner world
comes to us.
In fact, the more we are immersed in a story, the less we are able to think about that
story's context. This is one reason why real empathy is so expensive from a design point of
view. We have to walk a fine line between thoughtful and immersive. A good way to "keep us
honest", so to speak, is to use humor in the story. This allows us to laugh at a character and be
critical, but not unkindly. In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi laughs at herself while also making fun
of her surroundings. This kind of humor allows us to think about the context of the character's
environment while also knowing the character's traits and states of mind, both of which are
essential to empathy.
Good empathetic design encourages us to probe for more information beyond the
message, beyond what we are told. Persepolis does this by recognizing that it is the view of
one person by restricting itself to that one person. By encouraging identification with the
protagonist, too, the movie encourages us to find out more about her situation: the Iranian
Revolution.
Another way to allow people to probe beyond the design itself is to create a mosaic of
stories. The site humansofnewyork.com does this by presenting the anecdotes of people who
are involved in a particular incident and presenting telling details of that incident. This is also
done in historical research on primary documents to give a more complete picture of historical
events from different perspectives. This acts as a factor of safety that prevents us from looking
uncritically at any one perspective, especially on important issues (Lidwell et al. 2010).
Rule #9: Avoid propaganda
Propaganda appeals to emotion by pandering to our preconceived ideas about others.
The enemy is evil and must be destroyed. We are good. They are bad. We do not see the
enemy as having a mind or consciousness. True empathetic information design appeals to
emotion by bringing the distant other into a more intimate relationship with the viewer. The bias
involved in empathetic information design comes from known and true information about people,
while the bias in propaganda comes from untrue and/or unknown information about people.
And again, true empathetic information design makes the person we are to empathize with a
subject in his or her own story, rather than an object.
Propaganda also editorializes, or tells us what to think, about events. Stowe
editorializes rather than letting the events speak for themselves; this is probably the fastest way
to make any visual presentation into propaganda. Harriet Beecher Stowe does not allow us to
imagine what it feels to lose a child before she pounces on us with emotionally loaded
language. Propaganda posters do the same thing with melodramatic captions to the pictures,
such as "Destroy this mad brute!", referring to an ape representing Germany raping a woman,
and from Nazi Germany, "Why We Fight: for Our Children's Bread!", where we see a
sentimental photograph of German mothers and children (Luckert & Bachrach 2009).
There are two kinds of objects in propaganda: objects of adoration or protection, and
objects of hatred. The latter is more obviously a part of the history of propaganda, and it directly
dehumanizes the enemies of the propagandist's agenda. Examples are capitalists in
communist Chinese propaganda, and Jews in Nazi propaganda. The propaganda tends to
show the dehumanized with features exaggerated in such a way to make them seem
unappealing and alien. Propagandists apply labels that make them seem less than human,
stereotype them, and distance them from us. Jews and capitalists have large and exaggerated
noses. Jews are "vermin", and enemies of the Chinese Communist Party are "capitalist running
dogs".
Objects of adoration or protection are less obvious in propaganda, and it would seem
that these groups are humanized. However, they are only dehumanized in different ways from
the objects of hatred. Objects of adoration, like leaders, are often presented with features that
are exaggerated to an inhuman totalitarian-approved perfection, with their sharp noses, perfect
gleaming eyes, and straight white teeth. The leaders in the posters are out of the bounds of
humanity as they rally the ant-like people under them or crush their enemies. Objects of
protection, like peasants, women, or children, are idealized as innocent victims or cherished
mere objects. The Nazi poster showing the women and children is a good example of this.
Above all, propaganda conveys that to probe underneath its message is blasphemous.
Plato pointed this out about the stories in his ideal state in The Republic, where the philosopher
kings were to control the images seen and the stories told. They were to be solemn stories,
with no bad things said about the gods (Plato & Reeve 2004).
Propaganda has four main strategies for capturing us. Sentimental imagery not only
appeals to emotion over reason, it also implies that to reject the propaganda's message is to be
a bad or hard-hearted person. The image of the German women and children does this quite
effectively, implying that if a person does not support the war, then they do not care about
German children. Another tool propaganda uses is humorlessness. There is a type of humor I
mean that criticizes something else that is of higher status, between equals; it helps empathy
because the equals telling and understanding the joke or satire understand each other. If we
make fun of a dictator, we understand each other's feelings about the dictator. Uncle Tom's
Cabin is mostly humorless; it does not really make fun of masters or promote this kind of
understanding between readers about their failings. Instead, it mostly takes them absolutely
seriously.
In addition, propaganda conveys considerably higher or lower status to the viewer,
speaking with either authority or abject victimhood. It manipulates the viewer through
experience and symbols. Another sign of propaganda is evoking pure, rather than mixed,
emotions about the subject of the propaganda. The subject of propaganda, too, is usually an
idea of a person or thing, rather than the thing itself. Instead of letting that thing be the subject,
propaganda drenches it in its own stereotypes.
Rule #10: Use emotional urgency sparingly.
Propaganda usually uses emotional urgency extensively, but in itself emotional urgency
has uses for empathetic narrative. Emotional urgency is a state during which a person, or
people, are at their most panicked or angry. It usually involves passionate speeches ("you can't
do this; she's only a child!") and gestures to match. Persepolis uses emotional urgency only
when the mother, afraid for her daughter Marjane, tells her what happens to virgin girls whom
the Islamic regime executes; they are first raped by prison guards to prevent the assumption to
Heaven promised to virgins. We see close up how tears flow from the mother's eyes as she
tells Marjane all this. In information design, using this kind of emotion too much may overwhelm
the audience so that they cannot absorb the novel content you are trying to relay. Or, as Joel
Katz, a leading information designer, puts it, as exaggerations and words with powerful but
specific meanings are used out of context, the emotional power "raise[s] the volume without
increasing understanding (2012)."
Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, does just this. Like Satrapi, Stowe centers her emotional
urgency on motherhood. However, this is where the two diverge. Instead of using emotional
urgency sparingly, Stowe loads her prose with visceral anatomical language when describing
Eliza's motherhood of her son Harry, after having lost two babies: "every bleeding tie and
throbbing nerve, once more entwined with that little life[that was Harry](Stowe 2007)." There
are plenty of other instances of emotional urgency in the book, too many to discuss here.
True empathetic information design, as a form of empathetic narrative, calls on us to feel
with the other, by broadcasting similarities in "human experiences, feelings, hopes, and
vulnerabilities (Aldama 2010)." Acquaintance, according to David Woodruff Smith, a theorist on
empathy, is the experience of something in one's presence, and empathy is understanding an
experience from another's point of view. Acquaintance, in this case, is "seeing 'him' or 'her' as
another person (Smith 1989)." If we see someone as another person, we see that they have
minds and perspectives apart from ours. This knowledge of relative ignorance, ironically, gives
us more insight into, and curiosity about, what people are feeling and thinking than we would
have if we thought that their feelings and thoughts were just like ours.
Rule #11: Make people realistic
Seeing others as other people like us allows us to, as Woodruff Smith puts it,
"reproductively imagine" (1989) others. Reproductive imagination, or real empathy, is the
process by which we view others' subjectivity in our imagination. The feeling of sadness, for
example, is translated to us across the porous borders of different selves. Thus, when we see
people as subjects independent of ourselves, we can see their feelings as part of their, and our,
experiences.
The subjects we are to empathize with should have character faults to show their
independence from ourselves. Indeed, empathy does not mean withholding all negative moral
judgments of our subject. We will, in fact, sympathize but not truly empathize with someone
who can do no wrong, like Eliza from Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is how she can be said to not
truly triumph. We can say that the cartoon Marjane truly triumphs because she has actual
faults. We see her shame over turning an innocent man over to the Revolutionary Guards
because she did not want to be caught wearing lipstick. This is a fairly unforgivable thing to do,
and yet we are on her side because she redeems herself by pointing out the regime's hypocrisy.
Rule #12: Be specific
This is related to Rule #2; Persepolis is about a specific person's life and specific things
are good and bad about it. Marjane experiences both a happy family life and the terror of
repression and war. We see that she had a loving grandmother and parents, and a favorite
uncle whom she lost to the Islamic Republic. She loses a friend to war, and an acquaintance to
rape and execution by the regime.
This rule is where Harriet Beecher Stowe actually does something right; she catalogues
some specific things that were done to slaves. She uses real slaves' stories of slave owners'
cruelty. Characters are whipped, their families sold from them. Tom, in particular, is sold away
from his sister Chloe, and is beaten to death by Simon Legree, a northern overseer. This may
have been done to force readers to think about the story's meaning in real life.
Likewise, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is powerful because it
catalogues specific people and the things done to them. Yaffa Eliach's tower of photographs
has pictures of specific people in a specific village who were killed during the Holocaust. A pane
of glass that visitors pass names of specific people who died in the Holocaust; first names
naturally specify a person rather than a thing or a group of people. Merely showing a group
does not appeal to empathy the way showing an individual does.
This specificity is where we can open information design to empathy. By emotionally
engaging with the information, we can learn more easily the facts, and we feel more motivated
to seek them out. Emotional salience helps us to remember specific information about an event
(Sharot and Yonelinas 2008).
Rule #13: Bridge the gap
Show things about the person that the audience has in common with them. Marjane the
child loves French fries and ketchup, and is dressed like a western child; only the facial
features, not the color of the characters' skin, is shown. This ensures that the widest possible
western audience identifies with these characters based on real people.
Stowe shows very few common points, and only to a specific demographic: white
women. One character asks, "Have you lost a child? (Stowe 2007)" This would have been a
common concern for women, but white women would have been Stowe's primary literary
audience. More often, she separates black people from white people, comparing their
appearance with objects like wool. Even more egregiously, Stowe gives her black characters
traits that supposedly set them apart from the white reader, like openness to art and color
(Stowe 2007).
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, however, bridges the gap well. The
glass panel has first names of victims. People will identify this with their own and their loved
ones' names. The tower of photographs shows people doing ordinary things like the ones that
the museum visitors would have done.
Conclusion
All this comes down to a simple point: to design for empathy in such a way that
we treat people like equals. When we bridge the gap between the subject and the
person we have empathy with, we treat the user as equal to both ourselves and the
subject.
What does this mean for information design? We have seen before that details have to
be specific to the situation described. The design must also let these details speak for
themselves to allow the viewer to extend empathy, rather than wringing emotion out.
This results in a viewer-driven design, in which the viewer gets mental space to draw
conclusions. In Persepolis there are matter-of-fact descriptions of the simple but powerful
images shown, which allows us to process the images in our own way. There are few, if any,
spoken descriptions of emotions.
At the same time, there is a definite tendency to nudge viewers toward empathetic
reactions. The emphasis on similarities to viewers rather than differences encourages
identification with the characters.
An Addendum on Ethics and Information Design as
Social Engineering
To some extent, teaching others empathy is social engineering, as are traditional values.
Traditions are conventions established for no other reason than social cohesion. They are a
type of social engineering that attempt to change us to our ancestors' ideal states. If a tradition
emphasizes a culture's conception of honor, it tends to change people to be more honorable
according to that culture. Thus, we cannot "opt out" of social engineering. To avoid social
engineering is to choose another type of social engineering-usually to the status quo. Even
indigenous tribes engage in social engineering. They seek certain ends for the tribe's members
the way nations seek ends for their citizens through national myths, rites, and mores.
Aristotle points out that "man is a political animal", and he is right (Aristotle and Reeve
1998). Our brains are, in essence, social machines. We are constantly reasoning about where
we fit into our groups, and what to do to within them.
Social engineering is here defined as attempts to change people to another state for
some greater good, be it as small as relationships within a school or as great as world peace.
Although supervisory people are often in the best position to be social engineers, they should
not always socially engineer. Very powerful people (Keltner et al. 2003) and people mired in
dogma often do not possess the empathy and judgement about people needed for successful
social engineering.
There is also the distinction between bad and good social engineering. Bad social
engineering attempts to graft from the top by force or other means someone's ideal world. It
does nothing other than perpetuate the power of some people over others, whether a master
race or a dictatorship of the proletariat. Good social engineering facilitates better quality of life
among people from the bottom. My attempt to design information to evoke empathy is an
example of this because its aim is to make people independent of it. It is social engineering
made good by the attempt to transcend itself.
This is not an invitation for manipulation, but rather encouragement to bring out the best
in people. People acting consciously as moral agents are less likely to be bystanders to
injustice and instead act to rectify the injustice (Banyard, et al. 2003). Unfortunately, the direct
teaching of empathy will not reach everyone, so empathy must reach people by other means as
well. I will attempt to so so with my information designs.
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